Evil is Evil
| by Paul Craig
Roberts
(October 13,
2012, Washington DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) Back during the George W. Bush neocon
regime, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in his UN speech summed up George W.
Bush for the world. I am quoting Chavez from memory, not verbatim. “Yesterday standing at this same podium was
Satan himself, speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the
sulfur.”
Chavez is one of
the American right-wing’s favorite bogyman, because Chavez helps the people
instead of bleeding them for the rich, which is Washington’s way. While Washington has driven all but the one
percent into the ground, Chavez cut poverty in half, doubled university enrollment,
and provided health care and old age pensions to millions of Venezuelans for
the first time.
Little wonder he
was elected to a third term as president despite the many millions of dollars
Washington poured into the election campaign of Chavez’s opponent.
While Washington
and the EU preach neoliberalism–the supremacy of capital over labor–South
American politicians who reject Washington’s way are being elected and
reelected in Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia.
It was the
Ecuadoran government, not Washington, that had the moral integrity to grant
political asylum to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. The only time Washington grants
asylum is when it can be used to embarrass an opponent.
In contrast to
the leadership that is emerging in South America as more governments there
reject the traditional hegemony of Washington, the US political elite, whether
Republican or Democrat, are aligned with the rich against the American people.
The Republican
candidate, Mitt Romney, has promised to cut taxes on the rich, taxes which are
already rock bottom, to block any regulation of the gangsters in the financial
arena, and to privatize Social Security and Medicare.
Privatizing
Social Security and Medicare means to divert the people’s tax dollars to the
profits of private corporations. In Republican hands, privatization means only
one thing: to cut the people’s benefits and to use the people’s tax dollars to
increase the profits in the private sector.
Romney’s policy is just another policy that sacrifices the people to the
one percent.
Unfortunately,
the Democrats, if a lessor evil, are still an evil. There is no reason to
vote for the reelection of a president
who codified into law the Bush regime’s destruction of the US Constitution, who
went one step further and asserted the power to murder US citizens without due
process of law, and who has done nothing to stop the exploitation of the
American people by the one percent.
As Gerald
Celente says in the Autumn Issue of the Trends Journal, when confronted with
the choice between two evils, you don’t vote for the lessor evil. You boycott
the election and do not vote. “Lessor or greater, evil is evil.”
If Americans had
any sense, no one would vote in the November election. Whoever wins the November election, it will
be a defeat for the American people.
An Obama or
Romney win stands in stark contract with Chavez’s win. Here is how Lula da
Silva, the popular former president of Brazil summed it up: “Chavez’s victory
is a victory for all the peoples of Latin America. It is another blow against
imperialism.” Washington, making full use of the almighty dollar, was unable to
buy the Venezuelan election.
How will a
Romney or Obama win be summed up? The
answer will be in terms of which candidate is best for Israel’s interest; which is best for Wall Street’s interest,
which is best for agribusiness; which is most likely to attack Iran; which is
most likely to subject economic and war protesters to indefinite detention as
domestic extremists; which is most likely to screw the American people in order
to benefit the ruling oligarchy.
The only people
who will benefit from the election of either Romney or Obama are those
associated with the private oligarchies that rule America.
Paul Craig
Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor
of the Wall Street Journal. His latest
book, Wirtschaft am Abgrund (Economies
In Collapse) has just been published in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. A Chinese
language edition is forthcoming in Beijing, China.